OK, who's up for a bit of nomination news? There are a few items that have piled up, and some of them are quite interesting; starting with:

• St. John's South – Mount Pearl, NL - A Memorial University prof reports in his blog, Tickling Bight, this week that well-known Conservative television pundit Tim Powers is "rumoured to be sizing up a run" in this riding, currently held by first-term Liberal M.P. Siobhan Coady. Although based in Ottawa, Powers has also maintained good relations with the Newfoundland & Labrador government, even serving as an unofficial spokesperson for Premier Danny Williams when questions were first raised about his seeking medical treatment outside the country. In the wake of the "ABC (Anyone but Conservative) Campaign" run by the Premier during the last federal election campaign, a thawing of relations between the two conservative parties would be a precondition for federal Conservatives to become electorally competitive in the province again, and Powers undoubtedly played a backroom role recently in smoothing the way for the Prime Minister to visit the Premier in St. John's just days before Williams left for his surgery. As the blogger also notes, his entry could also open up the very close two-way race (2.8% of the vote, or 5.1 votes per poll) this riding saw in 2008 between Liberal victor Coady, and the NDP's Ryan Cleary, who has already been renominated for a second run at the seat. Taking a closer look at the riding map, I see that the boundaries have changed from the way I remember the St. John's West of old: it now takes in the part of downtown around the harbour (including Water and Duckworth streets) up to and including Quidi Vidi village, and has lost much of the southern part of the Avalon peninsula (basically everything south of Petty Harbour) to neighbouring Avalon riding. So, will he run? @powerstim himself is telling his tweeps entertainingly that "no moving boxes will be required", but of course that could still mean pretty much anything.
• St. John's East, NL - Staying in St. John's, the same blogger passes along news apparently originating with the CBC's Dave Cochrane (no link available) that former provincial Cancer Society director Peter Dawe "is considering" a run for the Liberals against the NDP's Jack Harris in this riding. Dawe headed the Cancer Society as the case of the inaccurate breast cancer tests became known and was being investigated, but he stepped down in the middle of last September to "seek other work". The timing of Mr. Dawe's resignation, not long after Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff's announcement in Sudbury last September that he would try to bring the government down, leads the blogger to believe that Dawe has been considering the run for some time. Harris commanded a 74.6% share of the vote last time, with Liberal candidate Walter Noel placing a distant second at 12.6%.
• Saskatoon – Humboldt, SK - Further west, a former M.P. today announced another run as an Independent candidate to try and regain his old riding. Jim Pankiw was elected as a Reform M.P. in 1997, serving two terms, and finally losing his seat while running as an independent in 2004. Three-term Conservative M.P. Brad Trost won the resulting four-way race in 2004 with just 26.7% of the vote, but has since increased his vote share to 49.1% in 2006 and 53.8% in 2008, with the Liberal vote declining, and the NDP moving firmly into second place. New Democrats are already revising the riding's priority upwards in light of Pankiw's return, a reader writes to confirm, and have had their candidate, health policy consultant Denise Kouri, in place since early last fall. The riding is home to the University of Saskatchewan, and encompasses the northeast part of Saskatoon and the rural areas further northeast, including Humboldt, Domremy, some farmland and a number of first nations' reserve communities.

Next time, some updates from B.C., and a round-up of a few more candidates who have stepped down.

Labels: 41st General Election Nominations, Conservatives, Independent Candidates, Liberals

In my likely nomination for best blogpost of the year in 2010, Daveberta tries to help those eastern pundits *not* to spin in the dark.

Labels: Alberta Politics

Thanks to Glen McGregor from this morning's Ottawa Citizen, we learn that a judge in the Ontario Superior Court has, as expected, granted an extension in fundraising time to the remaining 2006 Liberal leadership candidates having outstanding loans on the books.

The candidates will have a further two years to raise the funds necessary to pay off their debts, and must file reports with Elections Canada every six months, as of March. This puts the new deadline at the end of 2011, presumably December 31.

The latest figures for their outstanding loan amounts were reported in the story as follows:

• $395,890 [amount from June 3, 2008; his latest amount outstanding is not listed, as the story says he has been given until next year to pay it off] - Ken DRYDEN - June 30, 2010 deadline, but apparently already deferred to next year by the Chief Electoral Officer
  
• $193,133 - Maurizio BEVILACQUA
• $152,800 - Joe VOLPE
• $131,361 - Gerard KENNEDY
• $130,260 - Martha HALL FINDLEY
• $78,500 - Hedy FRY
• $40,000 - Stéphane DION
• $0 - Carolyn BENNETT
• $0 - Scott BRISON
• $0 - Michael IGNATIEFF
• $0 - Bob RAE

To put this in perspective, Mr. Bevilacqua will have to raise an average of just over $8,000 per month between now and the end of 2011 in order to meet that requirement, while Mr. Dion will have to raise just under $1,700 monthly to do the same.

Put another way, the campaign spending limit in Mr. Bevilacqua's Ontario riding of Vaughan was $103,581 in the last election. His outstanding debt is 1.86 times that amount.

Further to the rules, which were amended for retroactive application to the 2006 Liberal leadership race, these funds must be raised from individuals who have not already donated their one-time maximum contribution of $1,100 to that particular leadership race.

To those unfamiliar with the background of this issue, the reason leadership candidates are given a deadline to repay loans they take out to run their campaigns, is that an unrepaid loan would otherwise constitute a campaign contribution, and there are limits on the size of campaign contributions to leadership campaigns under the Elections Act. Indeed this issue was flagged during the introduction of those Elections Act changes, but never resolved legislatively. Subsequent legislation intended to address the issue of loans, their size, and who they could be taken from, has died on the order paper.

Labels: Party Finance

It's time to update two more analyses of the four quarters' worth of party fundraising. First, the contributions over $200 by week.

We read in Jane Taber's blogpost at the beginning of January about Liberal Party president Alf Apps' fundraising letter in which he claimed the Liberals had raised $100K in the last three days of 2009 alone. Indeed, they appear to have raised $319,696 in the last week from large contributors. The NDP raised $218,699 the same week from their large donors, while the Conservatives raised $355,828 from the same group. (We can't tell how much was raised from small donors by week, since those contributions are aggregated by the quarter and not dated.)

[Click on the chart to open an enlarged version.]



The one other week that was notable in the third quarter was the week starting September 27. The Liberal raised $289,387 that week, the NDP's weekly fundraising also spiked somewhat to $87,472, while the Conservatives' dropped to $85,334. You'll recall that this was the week the issue of the opposition's confidence in the government came to a head. The following week the two opposition parties' fundraising dropped off to almost nothing, while the Conservatives' rose slightly.

Next, let's take a look at the distribution of donations by total contribution size over the year. This analysis is an estimate, conducted across the four quarterly reports. It may miss some contributors whose donations did not meet the reporting threshold in any of the quarters, but the sum of whose donations would meet the end-of-year reporting threshold. The value of their donations would still be counted here in the <= $200 category, but would not be properly categorized by total contribution size.

The Liberals continue to rely most heavily on their largest donors of any of the three main parties, obtaining 36.1% of their fundraising from donors at the limit, and 46.1% from donors giving $800 or more annually. This compares with 5.9% and 9.2% for the NDP, and 7.1% and 14.3% for the Conservatives.

While the parties apparently all showed increases in the number of donors over 2007 and 2008, it is not safe to compare sums of quarterly contributors to the annual reports of contributor numbers, due to the high likelihood of double-counting. It's much safer to compare annuals over annuals, which we'll be able to do when the annual reports come out at the end of June.

Safer are comparisons based on amount, so long as the correct base year is used. 2008 was an election year, and thus an unusually high benchmark to try to meet in non-election years. Nevertheless the Liberals bested their 2008 fundraising total, while the NDP and Conservatives topped their 2007 totals, but fell off as expected from their 2008 levels.

Cumulative distribution of donations and contributors by total donation, by party, First, Second, Third & Fourth Quarters 2009

$ Amt of donations # of contributors	Lib		NDP		Cons
	$ Amt	Num	$ Amt	Num	$ Amt	Num
TOTAL	$9,564,677 (100.0%)	69,840 (100.0%)	$4,036,237 (100.0%)	51,342 (100.0%)	$17,707,846 (100.0%)	152,141 (100.0%)
(% of 2008)	(164.6%)	(226.2%)	(74.6%)	(172.9%)	(83.6%)	(136.0%)
(% of 2007)	(213.9%)	(298.1%)	(101.9%)	(220.5%)	(104.3%)	(141.9%)
<=$200*	3,160,203 (33.0%)	60,877 (87.2%)	2,707,373 (67.1%)	48,492 (94.4%)	12,008,855 (67.8%)	141,620 (93.1%)
<=$400	861,744 (9.0%)	2,800 (4.0%)	595,830 (14.8%)	1,872 (3.6%)	1,838,884 (10.4%)	5,783 (3.8%)
<=$600	867,739 (9.1%)	1,695 (2.4%)	232,833 (5.8%)	453 (0.9%)	838,820 (4.7%)	1,622 (1.1%)
<=$800	263,596 (2.8%)	369 (0.5%)	127,770 (3.2%)	176 (0.3%)	488,534 (2.8%)	666 (0.4%)
<=$1000	961,512 (10.1%)	1018 (1.5%)	136,173 (3.4%)	146 (0.3%)	1,279,157 (7.2%)	1,315 (0.9%)
<=$1100	3,050,489 (31.9%)	2,788 (4.0%)	202,907 (5.0%)	186 (0.4%)	1,227,751 (6.9%)	1,120 (0.7%)
>$1100	399,394 (4.2%)	293 (0.4%)	33,352 (0.8%)	17 (0.0%)	25,845 (0.1%)	15 (0.0%)

* <=$200 count includes counts reported to Elections Canada for both the categories "<=$200" and "<=$20" in each of the first three quarters; other counts calculated by totalling contributions for each donor (i.e., for each unique combination of firstname + middlename + lastname), and then counting by total contribution size for each donor.

Labels: Party Finance

[Welcome National Newswatch readers!]

Both the Conservative and Liberal parties experienced a pullback in fundraising in the fourth quarter of 2009, with each party showing a decline from 2007 levels. Meanwhile the smaller parties had mixed results, with the Bloc Québécois posting a decline from 2007 levels, but the NDP and Greens posting their best ever non-election year Q4 results.

2008 was an election year, which historically shows higher fundraising results for every party. Thus while year over year comparisons are interesting, they are less valid for assessing the strength of a party's fundraising apparatus.

[You can examine all the results in detail, and do your own analyses, by using the Browse Finance$ module here at the Pundits' Guide, and selecting "Quarterly Data".]



Now, to put things in perspective, the Conservatives did raise $4.87M from just over 40,000 donors. It might be their worst fourth quarter since 2004, but it's nothing to sneeze at in a recession, and nearly meets the amount raised in 2007. The party's overall take for the year rings in at $17.7M, down from a record $21.2M in 2008, but it still represents a small increase over 2007 as well.




Similarly, for the Liberals, they posted below average fourth quarter numbers (at $1.91M, they were lower than in 2007 when they raised $1.94M under former leader Mr. Dion), but those results nevertheless sit on top of record second and third quarters earlier this year for an annual take that exceeded even the election year of 2008, and nearly beat the last election year of the new financial regime, 2006. Remember, however, that an overwhelming number of the second quarter contributions were in fact delegate fees to the party's Vancouver convention in May.


The party has also slightly improved its take from the small donor category over the course of 2009 (donations <= $200), and significantly increased their numbers, a positive development given its previous dependence on large donors. This was compensation for the slight reduction in contributions they experienced in the large donor category this quarter, although that was perhaps to be expected, given the number of large donors who were already tapped out from earlier in the year.



We've already reported on the Bloc Québécois' fourth quarter report when it was released 10 days ago, but by way of recap, they appear to have replaced their former pattern of raising most of their money in the fourth quarter from small contributors, with a program to raise money from sustaining contributions spread out over the year. The change appeared to occur in Q4 of 2008.



The NDP would have to be classified as the "comeback kid" of fundraising in 2009. From a brutal, but apparently planned, first half of the year, the party made up the difference in spades over the third and fourth quarters, posting their best ever non-election year Q4 in 2009, and in fact their best ever non-election year, period, with a quarterly take of $1.65M in Q4 for an annual total that broke $4M for the first time ever outside of an election year.




And, in spite of recent stories about the financial situation of the Green Party, it's worth pointing out that they also managed to post a slight increase over 2007, based notably on a large increase in the number of small donors (from 2,893 in 2007 to 4,239 in 2009). The difficulty for that party is that it's still carrying an estimated debt of between $1M and $1.3M from the last election, and is raising just $1.12M annually on top of the $1.86M it receives in party public subsidies each year.



Next, I'll take a closer look at the parties' annual takes by total contribution size, and also by date. This will of course be an estimate until the complete annual reports are available at the end of June.

Labels: Party Finance

The following article from this morning's edition is reprinted with the kind permission of the Hill Times.

Online voting won’t hike youth turnout, but "it grows on you," forum told

Electronic voter registration will be the first step in Canada, although Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand is authorized to explore "alternative voting methods".

By ALICE FUNKE

MPs and party officials joined a group of academics and election administrators at Carleton University last Tuesday, to learn from Canadian municipalities and other countries who have already implemented internet voting (i-voting).

The symposium brought together experts from Estonia, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, California, and officials from three Canadian municipalities, all of whom have included some form of online voting in their recent elections.

Elections Canada participated in the event as part of its mandate to study voting technologies and encourage youth voter participation. Ironically, researchers addressing the forum all reported that i-voting did not on balance increase turnout among younger voters, but rather was especially high in 40 to 50 year-olds.

Estonia, dubbed "E-stonia" by one presenter because internet access there is a legislated social right, is the only country where remote i-voting is in place on a national scale. It works because of the country's widespread adoption of secure digital government ID cards for every citizen. The country is also trying to make smart card readers standard equipment on all new computers. The cards enable a wide range of government services from library cards to health care, and also permit a much more secure electronic voting process.

Electronic voter registration will be the first step in Canada, said Elections Canada spokesperson John Enright, although Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand is authorized by a series of amendments to the Elections Act in 2000 to explore "alternative voting methods" down the road, with the prior approval of Parliament.

Members of Parliament are readying themselves now to contribute to that study through the Procedures and House Affairs Committee, said Bloc Québécois MP Claude DeBellefeuille (Beauharnois-Salaberry, Que.). The Bloc is still researching the issue, she added, and has yet to take a position as a party.

Conservative MP Scott Reid (Lanark-Frontenac-Lennox and Addington, Ont.) was also in fact-finding mode for his caucus, as much for internal party processes as for elections, he said. Their next leadership convention must be held by postal ballot, he noted, but there might be some opportunities for test-runs of i-voting since their party constitution also provides for internal referenda to decide certain questions.

Theresa Kavanagh, who works in the NDP Whip's Office, wondered about the new role of scrutineers in an electronic voting process. All the electronic systems to date have instituted a full auditing process, but Ms. Kavanagh said she still has some questions about how it would work.

Municipal officials from Markham, Halifax, and Peterborough said they've all found very high user acceptance and satisfaction in post-election surveys, and that voter acceptance and adoption of internet voting grows over time.

“The municipalities are perhaps naive about the amount of risk they're assuming,” warned internet voting security expert Richard Akerman of the PaperVoteCanada.ca blog, though. “Very closely contested elections like Al Franken's recent race for the U.S. Senate were only settled because people could actually see the ballots,” he said. Had it been conducted over the internet, “the expense of defending the integrity of that system in the courts would have been huge,” he claimed.

More participants were comfortable with the idea of using i-voting during an advanced voting period for snowbirds, overseas voters, students and the disabled, noting that the current mail-in ballot procedures for such voters are no more secure than any internet solution. For visually impaired voters, the recent municipal i-voting pilots were the first time they had ever been able to cast a secret ballot. These four target audiences will be the focus of any trial run of electronic voting in a future byelection, Deputy Chief Electoral Officer Rennie Molnar told the conference.

Alice Funke is the publisher of the Pundits’ Guide to Canadian Federal Elections (punditsguide.ca).

Labels: Online Voting

It's been awhile in the making, but I've finally been able to add Google Maps to the riding profile pages for each riding here at the Pundits' Guide. If you look at the tabstrip of menu options above the riding's electoral results, you'll notice that a 4th option has been added after "Riding Results", "Financial Metrics" and "Census Data", namely "Google Maps".

Selecting that menu item brings up a fully interactive Google Map of the riding, colour-coded to the party which last won that seat. The menu item is titled "Google MapS", because I expect (one day, hopefully soon) to be adding other maps to it, such as maps showing earlier elections and maps showing poll-by-poll results. That's where all the action will be, in other words.

I also think this map can be improved by adding neighbouring riding boundaries, etc., etc. If you have other ideas to improve it, or encounter any difficulties otherwise, please leave a comment below.

For the technical readers among you, the full URL to link to a riding profile page showing the map appends a "pane=3" parameter to the query string (financial metrics are pane=1, census data is pane=2). So, for example, here is the URL that brings up the map for New Brunswick Southwest:

http://www.punditsguide.ca/riding_e.php?riding=976&pane=3

As always, you can generate the correct URL for linking to by using the "Permalink" feature at the top right-hand corner of any database-generated (i.e., non-blogpost) page.

For the really technical readers among you, I'm using the Google Maps API v.2 and feeding it with a GGeoXml object which is populated by a PHP script that dynamically returns KML generated on the fly out of my database. Setting up this whole technical infrastructure is what's taken some time. The poll-by-poll version is still in the works.

Of course, this feature would not be possible without the commitment of the Geography Division at Elections Canada to make their data available publicly and for free, and I hope you'll join me in thanking them for that undertaking.

Anyway, this website has needed maps for a good long while, so I'm very happy everything could finally get pulled together. Stay tuned for more developments ... and if you really want to see more of them, you can always invite my beau golfing for another week or so down south ... I'll miss him terribly, of course, but will just get a whole lot more done that way. Welcome home, dear!

Labels: Google Maps, Open Government Data

I'm attending the all-day Symposium at Carleton University today on "Internet Voting: What Can Canada Learn". We'll be getting presentations from folks in Europe and several Canadian municipalities about their experiences, and I'll be filing on it later in the day.

In the meantime, as I asked on Twitter last night, what are your concerns and/or interests when it comes to Internet voting? What questions would you have if you were here?

I'll keep an eye on the comments here, and on Twitter, and see what I can glean from the presentations.

Labels: Online Voting

The NDP nominations in two lakefront Liberal-held Toronto ridings were settled one way or the other over the past few days. Both have been Liberal-NDP contests for sometime: in the first case since 1988 (it switched between NDP-PC and NDP-Liberal before that), and in the second case only since 1997 (it was Liberal-Reform in 1993, and Liberal-PC before that).

• Beaches – East York, ON - The three-term riding president, Matthew Kellway, who works as a staff rep for the Society of Energy Professionals and is a founder and co-chair of the Toronto Energy Coalition, scored a reportedly strong victory this afternoon over street-front lawyer and environmental activist Barbara Warner. Kellway will now join returning Green Party candidate Zoran Markowski, and face six-term Liberal M.P. Maria Minna. Minna has held the riding since 1993, when she defeated three-term NDP M.P. Neil Young, who took over the riding, after a brief period between 1979 and 1980, from NDP M.P. Andrew Brewin (father of mid-1990's Victoria NDP M.P. John Brewin). Although the demographics of the riding have changed, the long NDP history in this riding along with the fact that they hold it provincially as well, have made it a perennial target seat for that party; with such high profile candidates as economist Mel Watkins running in 1997 and 2000, now Ontario MPP and recent provincial leadership candidate Peter Tabuns in 2004, and then former MPP and provincial cabinet minister Marilyn Churley running in both 2006 and 2008. Minna has held them all off, however. A geographer has assembled poll-by-poll maps of this riding across the 2004, 2006 and 2008 federal, and 2007 provincial elections and posted links to them at Babble (see post #25), if you're interested.
  
• Parkdale – High Park, ON - Although the meeting is not actually scheduled until this coming Thursday, the deadline for candidates to announce has past, and no-one else has stepped forward to challenge former one-term NDP M.P. Peggy Nash for her party's nomination. So she will be acclaimed Thursday for a rematch with first-time Liberal M.P. (and former Ontario MPP for the same riding) Gerard Kennedy, alongside new Green Party candidate Sarah Newton. In 2006, Nash defeated three-term Liberal M.P. Sarmite ("Sam") Bulte, who had replaced four-term Liberal M.P. Jesse Flis (although Progressive Conservative M.P. Andrew Witer held the riding for a term from 1984-88). In a 2006 provincial by-election held to replace Kennedy on his resignation to run federally, the riding elected an NDP MPP who was returned again in the 2007 provincial general election. Also, as noted by NDP blogger the Jurist, Nash's raw vote total in 2006 (20,790) is still the highest scored by any recent victor in that riding. Thus, that party believes it has enough incentive to continue to target the riding. Nash was also elected Federal Party President at the NDP's August convention in Halifax. The same geographer has also posted poll-by-poll result maps for this riding at Babble (see post #23), by the way, for both the provincial and federal general elections.

Thanks to several readers for getting in touch almost immediately with Sunday's news from the Beaches. If you have nomination news to share, please do get in touch by email. And then follow along on Twitter.

Labels: 41st General Election Nominations, NDP

The 4th Quarter Financial Return of the Bloc Québécois has now been posted at Elections Canada and entered into the database here; and it shows a very strong performance in 2009 for them, but one that saw contributions spread out much more evenly over the year than has been the case for that party before.

The party raised $208,455.07 in the last three months of 2009 from 1,936 contributors, for an average donation size of $107.67. This yielded an annual take of some $621.5K, the Bloc's best ever non-election year since quarterly numbers were first reported in 2005, and the new party finance regime took effect.



Notably they showed a slight increase in the number and amount of small donations over Q4 in 2008, as well as another slight increase in both numbers and amounts for the large donor category.

However those figures for Q4 are low when compared to earlier non-election Q4's for the Bloc, leading to the conclusion that the party is trying to spread its fundraising more evenly over the year, probably by trying to increase its number of sustaining monthly contributors. We've already noticed this trend before.

The other parties' Q4 returns have yet to appear on the Elections Canada site, either because they haven't been submitted, haven't been received, or haven't been uploaded by EC officials yet. The deadline to submit the 4th quarter returns is the end of January.

Labels: Bloc Québécois, Party Finance